Twenty-two guests stayed at Erddig during the month of August 1907. On Monday ‘the glorious twelfth’–the start of the grouse-shooting season for most country houses in Britain, but not for Erddig and its vegetarian squire–Ellen Penketh cooked her last dinner party.
It was, Louisa concluded, a triumph: ten guests on either side of the long dinner table with host and hostess at opposite curved ends, facing each other over vases of pink and white sweet peas and maidenhair fern. Louisa ignored Mrs Beeton’s rule that ‘no strongly scented flowers’ should be used as table decorations–Erddig’s sweet peas made one perfectly giddy with their summer perfume. The china she chose was Blue Spode. Footmen Arthur Barker and Fred Jones carried dish after dish from the fug and bustle of the kitchen up the short flight of stairs to the dining room: julienne soup, salmon, sweetbread, saddle of mutton, velvet cream, marble jelly, cheese straws and dessert apples. After dinner there was music and song by ‘Dr da Cumbra & Miss Sturkey’ in the Chinese room, lit by the eighteenth-century French ormolu and crystal chandelier.
There was nowhere better than Erddig in the summer, Louisa had long thought. The estate was an idyll where the world was kept at bay–and the world was more than usually intrusive that year. There was much worrying talk of a war with Germany. On 31 August the new Liberal Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman brokered the ‘Triple Entente’ between Britain, France and Russia to counter the sinister triple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Closer to home, the suffrage movement kept up its shrill protests in public places, capitalising on February’s morale-raising ‘Mud March’ in which three thousand women–Marchionesses, maids, textile workers, factory girls–had trudged in the rain from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall in London to plead the cause for women’s suffrage.
Louisa floated around the rectangular canal on Sunday 8 September with her boys, now aged four and two: ‘I took the chaps in the punt & again used my new Punt Pole which is a beauty.’ She had no premonition of the bomb that was about to explode in her and Philip’s lives–and neither, perhaps, did Ellen Penketh. When it came, it came out of the blue.
Monday, 9 September 1907: ‘Mrs Penketh who has been cook here for 5 years is a regular professional thief. She has stolen & robbed goods & money to the amount of £500. Mr Capper & I interviewed her.’
Hyperbole. Repetition. Louisa is in a fury, writing in a tone not previously seen in her diary. Her very language seems to have changed, or coarsened: are these the choice phrases of Mr Capper? Most awkwardly the Yorkes have guests staying, Gwen Darley and Stephen Donne, who are of course avid to hear more, servant stories being the bread and butter of polite conversation. The following day Mr Capper is invited (or invites himself) to lunch. With two extra pairs of ears in his audience he waxes lyrical, puffed up with the drama of the whole outrageous story. Downstairs in the gloomy blue kitchen Lizzie and Annie garnish cold cuts and fry up rissoles as best they can, for Ellen has disappeared, leaving her work undone and the basement in uproar.
‘Mr Capper came to lunch and told more & more tales of Mrs Penketh’s misdeeds’, writes Louisa. ‘Mrs Penketh is gone off for the day. We had not much heart to do anything so we sat & bemoaned our fate.’ What Capper had discovered, as he began to ask questions one day in Wrexham, was that the Yorkes owed vast amounts of money all over town. Their account with Henry Woollam the butcher was unpaid. Pritchard & Co., the general drapers, was unpaid. Dutton & Co., the grocers, had not been paid since November 1906, and the amount owing had grown to £200 4s 10d (an astonishing £11,500 in today’s money). In all, £361 12s was owing on the Yorke account books–while a further £142 19s 7d was owing off the books, for bills which had been quietly suppressed with the suppliers’ collusion. It was a huge amount of money: £500 (around £28,700). So what, he demanded to know, had Mrs Penketh been doing with the money Mrs Yorke had been giving her? The cheques had been cashed, and the Erddig account book marked ‘paid’ against each supplier. But they had not been paid. It was all in all a blistering vindication of Mr Capper’s original contention: if the household accounts had been kept under his control, none of this would have happened.
The next day Philip Yorke, who usually avoided unpleasantness or confrontation of any kind, cycled to Wrexham to see the family lawyer, Mr James. He returned with James, who interviewed the woman Louisa was now calling ‘the thief cook’. Her anger was unabated. ‘She is thoroughly frightened & a good thing too’, she wrote that night in her diary. ‘She was told she must leave today. She left at 7.15 wringing her hands.’ What Mrs Yorke didn’t know was that the servants had quickly pooled together what little money they had–£2 (£100 today)–to save Ellen Penketh from destitution, as she had nothing to her name. Whether through pity or affection we don’t know, but they also worked out a place for her to stay the night, late as it was: she could go to Mrs Edwards, who kept a corner shop in Wrexham. Mrs Edwards, who did much upholstery work for Erddig, had a daughter who was engaged to a Gittins–a family of long association with the servants’ hall. Gussie, the 16-year-old nursery maid, was a Gittins. Perhaps it was her suggestion.
And so Ellen Penketh, shopkeeper’s daughter, half walked, half ran in the luminous twilight of a September evening, to 68 Poyser Street, where she was taken in by another shopkeeper. Frightened and dishevelled, the ex-cook-housekeeper of Erddig Hall had little more than the clothes she was dressed in.
On Friday the thirteenth, another long house party regrettably kicked off, despite the absence of the woman who normally drove Erddig’s engine below stairs. Nervous housemaids Jinnie Fairman and Edith Haycock showed Mrs Beryl Binning to her room and brought up hot water and afternoon tea. The next day Mr Yeates was welcomed, and on the Monday Mr Browne arrived. The talk of the drawing room (and of the servants’ hall below) was all of Mrs Penketh. Louisa told the dreadful story so many times her own diary began to sound repetitive.
14 September: ‘Busy morning with Mr Capper. Alas! The Cook, Mrs Penketh, in whom I had so much trust, has robbed us of £500. She done it [sic] so very cleverly that hardly anyone could have found her out. Mr James came to talk about it but Mr Capper is the most practical. I fear we shall get no redress.’
The Yorkes were not given to talking ill of their servants; quite the opposite. Their very tolerance had earned them, over generations, a reputation for being over-lenient. But in the company of their house guests, all with a view to express and a horror story to impart (not least the well-connected and forthright Beryl Binning), Louisa began to mouth the platitudes of the era. Vita Sackville-West parodied such conversations in her novel The Edwardians, based on her childhood at Knole in Kent. ‘“Servants are so unscrupulous, one can’t trust them a yard”,’ Lucy, Duchess of Chevron says to her friend Lady Roehampton. ‘“However long they have been with one,–even if one looks on them as old friends,–one never knows when they will turn nasty.”’11
On 16 September, Louisa wrote in her diary that ‘Mrs Binning has had to part with her housemaid as I have parted with the Cook. It is sad to think how I have been cheated through thick & thin.’ The whole scenario touched a raw nerve for Louisa, just six years ago a spinster eking out an allowance of £20. Her social insecurity, her occasional heavy-handedness, her poor judgement when recruiting servants, her mismanagement of money…these things Louisa was aware of, and ashamed of, and her bubbling fury was as much directed at herself as at ‘the thief cook’. How could she have been so naive, so trusting? It was ruining the house party.
17 September: ‘I spent most of the day looking for bills & cheques. Mrs Penketh is I believe at Mrs Edwards. She will, I expect, unless she pays the money, be in prison before long. Her systematic cheating is almost incredible after all our kindness to her.’
The worst episode for the Yorkes was yet to come.
Perhaps it was Louisa pushing for vengeance; wanting her pound of flesh. Or perhaps it was the massed outrage of their guests and social callers that drove the Yorkes into a corner. Either way, they decided to press criminal charges against Ellen Penketh. This catapulted the case into quite a different arena–one that the very private, mild-mannered Philip Yorke may not have reckoned on. By pressing charges, the serene, closed world of Erddig would be prised open, laid bare and judged. Philip (now a white-bearded 58) had intimate experience of the courtroom. As Squire Yorke, a gentleman with a reputation for philanthropy, he sat at Wrexham Magistrate’s Court as a Justice of the Peace. He was also twice yearly summoned by the High Sheriff of Denbighshire to sit on the jury at the Courts of Assize at Ruthin, the Welsh market town twenty miles to the north-west. He knew, therefore, of the trauma of the witness box, the tricks of the barristers and the brutality of those Victorian gaols. He knew, too, about the press.
But Philip felt ill used, and he was a man who could not let a slight go unpaid for. Louisa’s diary indignantly recorded any knock to his reputation; any ‘insulting’ letters or ‘unfeeling remarks’. On 24 February 1905 she wrote that ‘Philip read to me some old letters of his past life. It is quite wonderful that all who tried to do him some injury came to grief.’ And now his trusting, good-hearted wife had been gulled by Mrs Penketh. Such was Philip’s anger at anyone laying a trap for his Lulu that he reached for the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut.
At seven o’clock on the evening of 19 September, Inspector Tippett of the Denbighshire Constabulary walked purposefully down Victoria Road, left into Poyser Street and stopped at the doorway of number 68. He cast his eye over the corner shop’s tin advertisement boards–Zebra Grate Polish; Birds Custard Powder (No Eggs! No Risk! No Trouble!). He lifted his hand and rapped three times. By now curious faces were watching from windows and a crowd of children had gathered. ‘Ellen Penketh,’ said Inspector Tippett, ‘I hereby do arrest you on a warrant under the Larceny Act of 1901.’ She was handcuffed and propelled at a smart pace the half-mile to the police station on Regent Street. Here he read over the warrant. ‘Prisoner made no reply’, Inspector Tippett wrote in his ledger. She was shown into a brick-vaulted cell–one of five–and locked up for the night. If Ellen Penketh could not find bail for £50 (around £3,000 in today’s money), she would be taken straight to Shrewsbury Gaol until the hearing at the magistrate’s court in Wrexham in a week’s time.
The ‘worry’ of what they had set in motion was ‘too awful’ for Louisa and Philip. Still–that night they ventured out locally to dine at Lady Egerton’s, transfixing the table with their shocking tale. ‘We opened our hearts to Major Leadbetter who has advised us to prosecute her.’ Did Louisa’s liberal conscience give her pause to consider the predicament of Ellen Penketh? If so, she did not record this in her diary. Or else she let Philip voice it for her: he was from this point on ‘kept awake at night’ by thoughts of Mrs Penketh’s ‘foolishness’. Two days later, he rose from his bed having had second thoughts: perhaps out of clemency, or through fear of scandal, or the dawning realisation of what his wife would be put through as primary witness–Louisa didn’t record her husband’s motive. Simply that, ‘He is going to try & withdraw the prosecution’.
But it was too late.